If
B U G 163 If What would the world be if Rosa Parks had instead gone to counseling for anger management? Grant Me the Wisdom I have to tell you, I struggle with the Serenity Prayer quite a bit. Do you know it? I’ll recite: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I personally learned the prayer from Al-Anon when I was about fourteen. For those of you unfamiliar with Al-Anon, it’s a support group for people sharing a part of their lives with an alcoholic. In my case, that was my Dad. In somebody else’s case, it was a husband, a wife, a brother, a friend. The only thing we all seemed to have in common was this: The part of our lives that we did choose to share with the alcoholic pretty much resembled the aftermath of a tsunami. What wasn’t dead already was instead buried, starving, and slowly dying of disease . And that disease was spreading. 164 C H R I S T O P H E R J O N H E U E R I went to my first Al-Anon group meeting when I was fourteen . I’m thirty-six now, so that’s twenty-plus years of holding hands with strangers and talking about our lives. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of parallels between the destruction wrought by alcoholism and the destruction wrought by other things. Audism being one of them. The general state of education for deaf children being another. Judgmental of me? Sure. But that’s how I’ve protected myself over the decades. I evaluate things along a continuum of sickness and health. I evaluate myself along a continuum of sickness and health. I figure that as long as I can see the black, the white, the gray, and all the shadings in between, then I’m living in balance. It’s a system that works for me. But when I have conversations with people about deaf-this and deaf-that . . . pretty soon I might go: “This is hopelessly sick.” Or I might be less negative and instead say, “Well this isn’t fair; we should change this!” It really doesn’t matter, if you want my personal opinion. People have the same reaction every time—they visibly shudder. Hell, they even attack! They say, “Hey, that’s the way it is! You have to learn to accept it and not be so confrontational!” Do I really have to, though? Accept it, and not confront it? Two hundred years ago, we had slaves, and now we have antidiscrimination laws. This was a huge social movement that succeeded in the face of overwhelming odds—it succeeded despite a civil war! Would I be wiser to give up and accept things the way they are? Or am I wiser to keep on believing that things might yet be changed for the better? I don’t know. Maybe the ultimate wisdom I’m going to get out of this is the understanding that nobody can decide that for me . . . except me. ...
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